Speaking and writing come pretty naturally to me, but setting a title is always the hardest part. It’s true while writing code as well- writing 1000 lines of code comes naturally, but when I have to create and name a new file, it’s a different story…

But, I digress- Hi! I’m Karthik Gaekwad, and I’m the newest member of the Developer Relations team here at Cloud-native labs. If you live in Austin, we’ve probably already crossed paths at one of the many meetups I attend or run including CloudAustin, Austin Devops, Docker Austin, OWASP, etc; or perhaps at Devopsdays Austin, for which I’ve been one of the core organizers since its inception in 2012. I’m also an author on Lynda.com, and have authored a few courses on Kubernetes, and Agile devops methodologies.

I’m joining the Cloud-native labs team from the Oracle Container Engine team- which is Oracle’s managed Kubernetes service running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Naturally, I’ll be focusing my efforts on Kubernetes, microservices and Cloud Native architectures and applications.

There are many things I’m excited about with the new job, but I’m most excited to learn and teach! The one constant theme that I’ve noticed with Kubernetes over the last few years since it got hot is the word “How?”. As a user of Kubernetes, I’ve frequented in the Kubernetes doc searching for answers, and as a Lynda author, I’ve received many messages of thanks from viewers that they now knew how to use Kubernetes. The cloud-native ecosystem is one of the fastest growing ecosystems I’ve seen, and it’s hard to keep up with the changes, new releases, and new projects that support the ecosystem. As a result, I’m excited to spend more time keeping pace with all the new happenings and spend time researching best practices for microservices and cloud-native apps, welcome new users to the world of K8s, and bridge the gap between the cloud-native platforms we have on OCI today.

I’ll be spending a lot of time researching, speaking, blogging and answering questions! Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, Linkedin or comment on here as well- I’m here for you!